When brushing, combing or drying hair, there is an unwanted build up of electrostatic charge on the hair, making it difficult to shape and set hair in a targeted manner in particular. Apart from unpleasantness for the person affected, dust particles collect to a greater extent on electrostatically charged hair, which may also result in the hair becoming dirty more rapidly.
Some hair care appliances, designed with an ionization device, use a carrier medium, e.g., a stream of air, to convey ions onto the hair to be neutralized. But this necessarily means that the ionization device must be set up in a stream of air and/or in the immediate vicinity of a stream of air. First, this restricts the design freedom of the hair care appliance, and secondly, the scope of use of such ionization devices is limited to such hair care appliances which generate a stream of air.
In addition, because of the eddy currents which are unavoidably present in the stream of air, this allows targeted and controlled application of ions to the hair in an inadequate manner. In particular due to the unavoidable and difficult-to-control air eddies in an air outlet, a substantial portion of the ions do not even reach the hair that is to be neutralized.
In addition, with the ionization devices known from the state of the art, the ionization tips are mostly produced from needles or curved sheet metal, having tips not only in the direction of flow of the ions but also in other directions, which have the effect of concentrating the electric field.
Parallel capacitances and resistances develop due to an electric connection between the ionization tip and the high-voltage-carrying high-voltage cable and due to the mounting of the tip, and these lead to parallel currents during operation of the ionization device; this greatly reduces the voltage achievable at the ionization tip.
However, if a high voltage sufficient for ionization is to be made available at the ionization tip, the high-voltage source must be designed with large dimensions accordingly.